by Adélia Prado
blurting curse words: damn, damn,
but it’s myself I damn,
since this love lives inside me
and maybe it’s only God playing the mime.
I want to see Jonathan
just as fervently
as I want to kneel down and worship
and belt out the ‘Panis Angelicus’.
I’ve been singing since childhood.
Since childhood I’ve desired and still desire
the presence that would silence me forever.
While the other girls danced,
I stood still, wanting,
I lived on wanting.
Pomegranate liqueur,
invisible blood pulsing in the presence Most Holy.
Lustily, I sing out:
Jonathan is Jesus.
The Pelican
One day I saw a ship up close.
I stared for a long time
with the same slow greed that I watch Jonathan:
fingernails first, then fingers, knuckles.
I loved that ship.
Oh! I said. What a thing is a ship!
It swayed gently back and forth,
smooth as a seducer.
I looked around for someone, longing to say:
Look! Look – a ship!
Eager to talk about what I didn’t understand
so as to learn at last
how something with no feet
walks on the wide waters.
One night before sleep –
just as I’d seen the ship – I saw a feeling.
Beset by oohs and aahs, sudden muteness,
almighty vocatives, I stammered:
Oh, you! And O You!
– my throat burning to cry.
It struck me that there in the dark of night
I was poeticised,
desired by supreme desire.
O Mercy, I said,
and placed my mouth on the torrent from His chest.
O love, and I let Him caress me,
as the vision faded,
lucid, illogical,
true as a ship.
Silly Girl
I want to see Jonathan,
here or wherever he lives
exiled from me.
It’s a drizzly Sunday
like the one long ago
when Ormírio arrived
with his stepdaughter, Antonia,
and gave me a bunch of grapes.
I feel the same kind of longing
for that Sunday as I feel for Jonathan.
Antonia was as simple as I was happy,
the earth was spinning slowly on its axis,
and everything conspired
to make me sing my favorite song.
When I fell in love with Jonathan,
I wrote his name all over the house,
and my father asked: ‘What’s this?’
The name of a prince, I told him,
it’s pronounced Narratanói –
it’s from the Thousand and One Nights….
My rough-hewn father,
easily humbled by certain words,
was proud of me
for giving him power over phrases from afar.
Oh, Jonathan, I discover that I’ve loved you
since WWII
when the allies were beating the Germans.
Grandpa used to pronounce it ‘theallies’,
and Mama, too, imagine!
And me more than anyone:
‘Theallies are going to win the war.’
Because I knew by divine inspiration:
‘Power belongs to he who has dominion over words.’
I planned to use this power against you,
which my mother had used against me:
‘You’re working class,
he’s too handsome,
he’ll leave you in the end!’
But, Mama, he didn’t, just as my vocation for perfect joy
won’t desert me,
despite all the sorrows.
Look, decades later,
and it’s still in me:
eagerness for rain,
for green guavas,
and sun that illuminates roof tiles
with the white flames of noon.
It’s as if she were still here
with Papa, Grandpa,
Ormírio and the bunch of grapes,
like when I burst out with ‘Tantum Ergo’,
the wrong song for Christmas Eve.
What a great courtesan I was practising to be,
because it was an orgy,
that happiness made of trifles,
it was all so shabby.
I was already in love with Jonathan,
because Jonathan is this:
a poetic fact that has always existed,
dream-matter, dreams themselves,
where everything else becomes unimportant.
Now that I’ve decided to be a mystic,
I write on his picture:
‘Jesus, José, Jehovah, Jonathan, Jonathan,
the smallest flower is my judge.
Leave me in the desert atoned,
stone made of stone yet
set upon stone.’
I rhyme for prettiness, it’s not that I’m feeling sad.
You could call this poem ‘The Tortured One’,
but meanwhile, I certify that I’m happy,
glad to have squandered
what I meant to ration,
which – it’s certain –
time does not erode.
Honey flows,
a sweet song bird feeds me.
Lightning against black sky
and this sweetness that never rests.
Even more so than the flowers,
these vegetables are made for me,
my belly converts them into symbolic gold.
Nothing comes close to what I am
except another person and another
and yet another person.
I see a newborn baby and I’m transported.
I try saying: ‘Inside the earth,
sheets of water over beds of sand.’
It’s like plunging a spear in my chest,
I vibrate, loving the torrent
as I love Jonathan.
Fish are fond of me, and fetuses.
I embrace people before they embrace me,
I disarm them,
tenacious as a bee
I try to make them understand:
Life is so good,
all it takes is one kiss
for the delicate gears to get moving,
a cosmic necessity protects us.
The unclean spirits proclaimed the Christ
as they entered the swine.
This new joy is proclaiming me,
the same joy
as long ago when I was given grapes and it was raining
and I was happy to see Antonia,
that silly girl.
‘Wrath sits ready to ambush like a sharp-toothed fish’
is nothing but a pretty line.
There’s no returning from this country:
a man at the window sings –
unrehearsed – a little melody.
God placed the rainbow in the sky,
and branded it,
His hieroglyph.
I’m out of time,
happiness consumes me.
FROM
Knife in the Chest
(1988)
The human heart – dark, dark.
JOÃO GUIMARÃES ROSA,
from Grande Sertão: Varedas
Biography of the Poet
Once there was a house with copaíba trees,
two huge ones.
And so begins my love for Jonathan,
with this beautiful account.
Each time my father mentioned the copaíbas,
it was as if to report anew:
‘God spoke to Moses from these very trees.’
&nb
sp; Well then. Two copaíbas,
two o’clock in the afternoon,
everyone making coffee.
A voice announced:
‘You and your brother can play right here,
you won’t be in the way.’
Anyone who could rhyme was called a poet.
The world beckoned,
flowers down here,
stars up above.
Not even Solomon in his glory
was happier.
Can the horror of faeces be turned to love?
Must I experience at least minimal
discomfort and strangeness
in order to remain human?
I wanted to invent the cross-stitch and yeast
(it’s humiliating to follow recipes),
tiny butterflies, computers,
narrow streams full of fish,
telegraph cables under the sea.
I discover that I’ve never seen
the true Face of God.
There are women in my circle
who pray joylessly
and can recite the entire book from top to bottom,
including the copyright, list of editions, preface,
and address to report answered prayers.
All I want is to say: O Beauty, I adore You!
My entire body trembles at Your look.
The Meticulous One
The cerebral poet takes his coffee without sugar
and retires to his office to concentrate.
His pencil is a scalpel
sharpened on stone,
the calcinated stone of words –
an image chosen because he loves difficulty
and the respect that comes
of his contract with the dictionary.
Three hours he’s been trying to incite the muses.
The day blazes on. His balls itch.
Meanwhile, in no time at all
things will begin to phosphoresce in the forest.
God’s servant leaves her cell nightly
and walks down the road,
because God feels like a stroll
and she can walk.
And the young poet,
reeking of suicide and glory,
steals from all of us: ‘God is impeccable’
– and doesn’t even need to sign his name.
Frogs startle and leap,
but the meticulous one doesn’t get it;
he wants to write things with words.
Laetitia Cordis
Settle down a minute and look, a miracle:
cloud-covered morning,
touch of chill and fog.
My heart, yellow as a pequi fruit
beats like this:
Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan.
All around me they’re saying:
‘It’s just haze, the sun’s sure to come out.’
I’m thinking about Giordano Bruno
and what an incredible lover he’d be.
I want to dance
and watch a Slavic film – without subtitles,
so I can guess when those strange sounds
are saying I love you.
People are so beautiful,
God is so handsome.
I am Jonathan, leaning against my bicycle,
posing for a picture.
When the pequi are ripe
they split open and fall,
making nests on the ground, yolk-yellow.
My heart wants to leap,
to beat here on the outside,
like His.
History
It afflicts me to read:
‘The first bicycles appeared in eighteen-hundred-and-something.’
I need them to be eternal. God understands,
God and anyone who reads poems the way I think of Jonathan.
My father said:
‘Grandpa would tell how his great, great grandfather
rode around on a funny bicycle delivering cheeses,
also eternal, and eggs,
which have always existed.
He had the same last name you do,
my daughter,
which he gave to his son, who would give it to his grandson,
a cord planted in the belly button of our Eternal Father.’
Which is why I’m in no danger of not meeting Jonathan,
joy of my life for whom I wait like in the Psalm,
‘more eagerly than the night guard awaits the dawn.’
Human history is picturesque. Dates
are scholars’ toys.
When God created the world
he created the bicycle and the green path
where Jonathan waits for me, for this beautiful scene:
as the lovers pass by,
the flowering grasses shiver.
Immolation
A heat wave is revving in my body,
sign of the cycling down
of something in me
that will never again
be rose or satin.
Meanwhile, compared to dried flowers
and old photographs – laughable today –
these remain unchanged:
shoals of fish, corollas,
new shoots dancing in the afternoon breeze.
How are such tiny fish possible,
and this yellow – or any yellow at all?
Fish live underwater
and they don’t drown!
Take my life, I have yet to ask God,
to prove the measure of my joy.
Today what I want is to laugh at this silly contrivance:
‘a wagonload of devils’.
Wagons are peaceable things
and a little yelling would drive away devils like those.
In the root of sadness, this antibody:
whatever it is yellow is,
that’s what my soul and its happiness are made of –
and the world’s beauty and Christ’s soul.
Opus Dei
Butterflies never give up,
they have no idea their name is unbecoming.
The seasons follow each other flawlessly
and still you’re afraid to admit
there’s no sin in saying
O Beauty, thou art my joy.
Loosen up,
Jonathan is just a man.
If you so much as curl your lip
his lance retreats.
Insects are beyond understanding,
wisely gnawing on precious treatises.
One drop of sap can kill a man.
That’s why you should surrender to anything
that makes you that beautiful when you laugh.
This is not comic opera.
It’s just a not-knowing shot through with lightning.
If Jonathan turns out to be God, you’re right
and if not, you’re still right
because you believe it
and no one can be blamed for loving.
In Portuguese
Spider, cork, pearl
and four more that I won’t tell
are perfect words.
Dying is unsurpassable.
God weighs nothing.
Butterflies is seilfrettub,
soap boiling in the pot.
I hope these oddities
are psychologisms,
corruptions owing to
original sin.
Words – I want them first as things.
My head is getting tired
of this unhappy discourse.
Jonathan asked:
‘Have you had your yoghurt today?’
What sweetness spilled over me, such comfort!
Languages are imperfect
so that poems can exist,
and so I can ask where do these come from –
winged insects and this tenderness,
his arm grazing mine.
Parameter
God is better-looking than I am.
And He’s not yo
ung.
That’s consolation.
Words and Names
I’m equally dumbfounded by mystics
and by clothing stores with their prices.
My tooth is rotting
and I won’t lift a finger to save it,
having chosen fear
as my lord and master.
There’s dust to spare on the bookshelf
and books in overabundance
and letters all full of themselves blocking the way:
‘To me, writing is a religion.’
Writers are unbearable,
except for the sacred ones,
who put ‘Oracle of the Lord’ at the end.
I feel paralysed
because I want fire like that –
and well-cut clothes
made of imported fabric.
Ai! I’m never going to write a ‘Cantar D’Amigo’.
But meanwhile, as if I were Galician,
doves coo in my soul,
in the eaves, in early morning,
sparrows, little seamstresses.
Now my name is none,
unlike the many encrusted in my old one:
Délia, Adel, Élia and Lia,
and to my affliction
Leda, Lea, Dália,
Eda, Ieda and also Aia.
Aia is the best!
Aia, servant of a noblewoman,
a lady-in-waiting,
whose job it is
to record her life on paper
and spy m’lady through a peep hole
having sex with the King.
Butterfly – both the spelling
and the sound are mistakes
and mistakes interest me,
I kill spiders to learn
where they come from.
Nature is obedient and happy,
Nature follows its own laws,
it doesn’t flow from God.
But me – what am I?
The Tenacious Devil Who Doesn’t Exist
God’s glory is greater
than this plane in the sky.
And his love,
which is where my fear comes from,
that sea of delights
where planes crash
and ships founder,
I know oh so well,
and I also know how disastrous it is
to be the body of time,